Our Work
We believe in the power of the masses. We believe in democratic-decision making and that those who are impacted by policies and campaigns should be the ones leading them. We believe that by organizing the masses of students to put pressure on people in power, we can win. There are only tens of administrators and lawmkaers who stand in our way; there are hundreds of thousands of us.
Rallies & Marches
We believe that public-facing actions that call out people in power are a tactic to win material change for the masses. By organizing masses of students and workers to put pressure on university administrators and lawmakers, we call to question the nature of power in our city. The point of organizing a mass is to ultimately shut down the functioning of a university. When a university administration takes a day off, the university continues as normal. When thousands of students do not come to class, a university ceases to function. We realize that it is students, staff, and faculty who ultimately hold power.
In our work, we have held rallies and marches to organize students, staff, faculty, and community members across both the public and private institutions to realize our mass potential. While university administrations and lawmakers may want to pin us against each other, we realize that students—from both the public and private sectors—are stronger together. When we organize together and build out our mass movement to leverage our collective power, we know that we can win.
Cross-Campus Exchanges
As a participatory body, we make democratic decisions. Those who are in the room are the ones who have organizing power and make the decisions around the strategy and tactics of our work. Twice a month, we hold cross-campus exchanges. These cross-campus exchanges are meetings where we have critical discussion and debate, make decisions around our campaigns and actions, and conduct mutual aid such as feeding our comrades and hosting clothing-swaps.
Student Organizing Workshops
NYC Union of Students seeks to function as a central node of student organizing in NYC. This means serving as a network of student organizers and providing resources, including hosting Student Organizing Workshops at different college campuses throughout the city. At these workshops, a Student Organizer from NYCUS will run through the basics of student organizing—a Student Organizing 101, if you will. This includes critical organizing skills like how to conduct a 1-1 conversation, developing student leaders, making an escalating campaign timeline, hosting a meeting yourselves, and fighting against apathy in our spaces. Most importantly, these workshops imbue students with organizing skills they can take to their day-to-day organizing lives.
Legislation & Lobbying
While legislation, lobby, and electoral politics are not the focus of our work, we also acknoledge the importance of engaging with the power structures in our society, and we realize the mistake it would be to isolate ourselves entirely from electoral work, politicians, and government.
REPAIR itself is a piece of legislation that needs to pass through the NY State Legislature. We encourage all students, staff, faculty, and concerned community members to write to their legislators to support REPAIR and higher education equity in NYC.
As part of our work, we write to our legislators at meetings and plan to head to Albany to put direct pressure on State Legislators to support and uplift students in our work for a more equitable higher education system in NYC.
NYC UNION of STUDENTS 